Monday 27th
Boris is back at work, the sun eventually comes out and I settle down to a day of listening and trying not to get back ache while sat at the computer. Mrs Fisher has my regular chair, a proper office chair with adjusters for and height and angle, bought for a pound when Hills Supplies were having a clear-out and ever since that day ensconced in IF HQ. She is working after all and I’m just buggering about filling in my day.
The world shifted on its axis today after we slept in meaning the morning walk had to be abandoned. It was overcast and looked like rain anyway but in the evening, the sun is out and we decide to go for an evening walk instead. We’re both slightly worried that the paths will be busier but we needn’t have worried as they’re just as quiet as on a morning. Except when we leave Whitechapel Road to go up Turnsteads, where it looks like they’re filming an advert when everybody has to leave their homes at exactly the same time and there’s about twenty people, joggers, dog walkers, family groups all appearing as if from nowhere which makes for a kind of modern street dance with people maneuvering around each other making full use of the road.
We use the walk to settle a dispute that arose on Sunday morning; in Scholes there’s a house with a gas barbecue permanently set up in the front garden. A huge affair that looks like it could feed ten people, it sits in a well kept garden with well kept garden furniture in it, and since Saturday a beer garden parasol. The houses on this side of the street spend the morning in the shade but I’m guessing that once the sun comes around the meats out of the fridge, the beers flowing and those front windows are wide open with a speaker in each blasting Dire Straits or Robbie Williams. Two doors down there’s a tiny kebab BBQ on legs sitting amongst overgrown grass and shin high dandelions. Still on it from Saturday is a kebab that didn’t get eaten. I got them mixed up. I thought the uneaten kebabs were on the posh BBQ and they so obviously weren’t. 1 - 0 to Mrs Fisher
At nine o’clock we decide to watch the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People. I decide that a huge whisky and ice would be in order. Having a huge whisky and ice on a Monday night is the kind of thing that only happens whilst on holiday. It feels ridiculously frivolous but what the fuck.
Tuesday 28th
There’ll be no BBQs for the next few days as the weather forecast has rain in it. The temperature has dropped and the sky is full of slow moving grey cloud This poses a problem for us as we’ve decided that the evening walk gives us a little bit more time but if its raining we’re buggered. Which is what happens. I spend the afternoon finishing the Nazi death camp book while listening to some old Panasonic albums.
The furthest I get today is to the bottom of the street to take the green bin down. Has cabin fever set in? I’m not missing the walk. I’m not getting excited about going outside.
We settle down to watch Normal People with two huge glasses of whisky and ice. Standards are slipping.
Wednesday 29th
Mrs Fisher receives news that as from tomorrow, she’s being furloughed for a month. I go back to work and she stays at home.
In the afternoon it pisses it down and the temperature drops further. We’re both in the house wearing three layers, scarves, hats and in Mrs Fisher’s case fingerless gloves. I sit downstairs and catch up on some back issues of the London Review of Books one of which has a great article on Simone De Beauvoir in it, apparently she tried climbing on Sartre’s corpse but was held back due to his gangrenous sores, a sympathetic nurse put a blanket over him and up she popped. All while listening to the three CD’s that make up Further Perspectives & Distortions - An Encyclopedia of British Experimental and Avant-Garde Music 1976 - 1984 that came out on Cherry Red and to which I’ve only half listened to since purchasing. Such are the benefits of having no enthusiasm for re-grouting the bathroom. Besides, I have no grout.
I’m just about to put the central heating on when there’s a break in the cloud and all seems good with the world once more. When Mrs Fisher finishes her work from home shift she asks if we’re going for a walk or not. Its brightening up I tell her, we should do it. Apart from when I’ve been ill I can’t remember ever having spent two consecutive days in the house [green bin aside] and I’m getting cabin fever.
Its a different world out there, most of the cherry blossom now lies in sad wet clumps in the gutter or splattered on pavements but there’s a freshness to the air that only arrives after a downpour. I just wish my new walking shoes would arrive as my old Merrells are thin in the sole and are beginning to make my feet ache.
Thursday 30th
I get an email from Milletts telling me my walking shoes are unavailable and that a refund has been processed.
In the morning I go to Tesco and part with an unbelievable amount of money for a weeks shopping. The atmosphere in the store is still a strange one, with people doing their best to stay the requisite two meters apart and waiting patiently while a fellow shopper makes their selections. All this done in silence. Tesco have a one-way system in place but some people find the blue circles with arrows in them hard to compute and I see a few shoppers going up when they should be going down and vice versa, all to much sotto voce grumbling from fellow shoppers.
We have the home made warmed up minestrone soup for lunch and in the afternoon I settle down to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads and the Guardian crossword all while listening to Whitehouse’s ‘Cream of the Second Coming’ at a low volume, just to see if the low volume ambient Whitehouse listening experience is as good as what I’ve heard. Its a release I don’t think I’ve ever made it through in one sitting and decide today is going to be the day. Shortly after it starts I fall asleep and wake up five minutes towards the end of My Cock’s on Fire [Long Version]. I still think its one of the funniest records ever made. What I’ve heard of it anyway. I wonder how many people there must be in the world who are listening to Whitehouse and reading Alan Bennett. Me and Dando maybe? Walsh? Its only later in the day that I realise I’ve been reading Bennett while listening to Bennett.
After ploughing my way through all 600 pages of the history of the Nazi death camps I’m in need of lift. Bennett’s Talking Head characters provide the perfect riposte; ‘Curtains in orange nylon and no place mats, there’s not even the veneer of civilisation’.
All semblance of getting up early to go on the walk has gone out of the window. In three days time I’ll be getting up at 5.30 a.m. to go to work and thats early enough for anybody. If the weathers fine we’ll do the evening walk but today its hailing and cold and we have three layers and hats on again. Putting the central heating on at the end of April seems like such decadence. Its not like we live on the moors.
In India, Hindus are attacking the funerals of Christians who have died of the coronavirus thinking the corpses [which are buried as opposed to being burnt] will contaminate the earth. Bolsorano sacks his health minister for offering stay at home advice while in the Amazon they’re burying people in mass graves. Trumps self imposed ban from press briefings after his disinfectant injecting embarrassment is short lived and he’s soon back at the microphone, albeit in a different room, probably because he’s got nothing else to do with the golf courses being shut.
After going outside to clap for carers Mrs Fisher says she’s putting the central heating on. Its raining but actually warmer outside than it is inside.
Over the last six or seven weeks my mood has swung from fear to panic to dismay to incomprehension to anger and finally to apathy as it becomes clear that the ‘situation’ is here for many months, maybe even years to come. Who knows, maybe there’ll never be another normal. News that Wetherspoons wants to reopen in June or that Boris is on sprog number six brings me no cheer whatsoever.
Friday 1st
A morning walk for a change. Out of the door by eight and when we get to the motorway bridge the Timid Lady is behind us. We pass Cheery Bloke but he’s not cheery. Halfway down Whitechapel road there’s the Speed Skater making his way inexorably uphill. The pet rabbit is still facing right and the barbecue still has meat on it. At the bottom of the street there’s a dead rat.
Saturday 2nd
In a change of routine Mrs Fisher joins me in a walk in to town. From the offset we’re like salmon going upstream zig-zag fashion crossing Westgate at regular intervals as all manner of human flotsam gets in our way. This includes a young lad with a delivery bag over his shoulder who emerges from the bottom of Waltroyd Road and crosses Westgate to be on the same side as us.
Sunday 3rd
This being the weekend we should all be getting out of bed in the middle of the night to experience the dawn chorus. This being the time of the year when birds are claiming territory and looking for mates. Busy, busy, busy. No virus to worry about for the birds and the bees, just an urge to go out and do what comes naturally. I want to hear it for myself but setting the alarm for four o’clock and actually getting out bed and getting dressed and walking to the park in the half dark isn’t going to happen after two bottles of wine and two large G&T’s, shared of course. Fortunately for me I woke just before dawn with a banging head and aching guts and sat on the toilet with the window wide open and listened. Even from my modest perch it was an impressive sound. I’ll do it one day.
The ‘lockdown’ has ended up being very different from how I envisaged it. I thought I’d be checking out streaming services but checked out none. Instead of looking out for entertainment and stimulus I looked in. I watched spring unfold and read books and wrote and made soups from fridge scraps and every night me and Mrs Fisher would turn on the TV at nine o’clock and watch something on iPlayer together. I also watched my bank balance grow because I was still getting paid and there was nothing I wanted to buy, except for food and a pair of walking shoes that never came. I think I’ve been incredibly fortunate.
On our walks me and Mrs Fisher have watched trees come in to blossom and lose it, we’ve become familiar with the comings and goings of people, birds and squirrels and even rats. There are more bird sounds I’m familiar with than before. There are more trees and plants I can name straight off. This slow pace of life suits me perfectly. Enforced laziness leads to appreciation of nature and reduction of book pile. Put that in your headline. I’ve also enjoyed writing more, even if it has been drivel like this. The review pile has been flattened. Me and Mrs Fisher found a routine that suited us and we worked with it. Apart from the barbecue incident we’ve been solid for the whole month. I’ve caught up with old friends on the record shelf, finished a 600 page book on Nazi Death Camps that I feared I’d never get around to reading and finished many a crosser. Life could have been a lot worse.
And tomorrow I have to go back to work. This already feels like a strange thing to be doing. What awaits me there I have no idea but I shall get in the car at six o’clock and turn on the radio and get back in to my old routine. What happens after that I have no idea.
Neil Campbell - Sound For Empty Centre
CDR/DL
Sticky Foster and Neil Campbell - Split Cane Enabled / Theme From Resonant Ache.
Cassette/DL 42 copies.
Pictures of Campbell dancing like a loon on the moors above Mirfield lead me to believe that cabin fever may have finally done some damage. Whether this recent outing was a solo expedition or with family as part of government sanctioned daily exercise is not known. Such an harmonious outfit though the Campbell clan, often to be seen early on a sunny Sunday morning skipping down the Aire and Calder Navigation path, wicker baskets in crook of arms doing a bit of frog spotting while searching for wild mushrooms with which to make a risotto with.
Recent solo Campbell material has tended towards the more energetic side of things, last years Cloud Drag 1979 being a good example of Campbell doing 120mph down the M62 looking for a gap in the traffic at Cooper Bridge. Sound For Empty Centre and one half of the collaboration is more akin to last years Mirror Mania Ersatz Chamber in that it takes the foot off the accelerator, in fact it gets out of the car altogether and goes for a walk along the canal path looking for more sodding mushrooms.
The collaboration between Campbell and Foster sees Foster in Tunisia and Campbell in where else. Foster seemingly being able to get out and about so he can get his hands on some snake charming horns, the result being Split Cane Enabled and its droning, honking, parping-ness mixed with the sound of distant road drills and shaker bells.This is what you need to be playing when the daily press briefing comes on so that you can drown out the news that shoplifting figures have gone down and of exorcising the mere thought of Priti Patel. Keep it up lads. This country needs you. Not sure about whats going on in Tunisia though. Its not in the news so we’ll assume all is good. The flip is a much more subdued affair. Maybe they’d stopped listening to the daily briefings by now and have chilled out somewhat. Here be some haunting vocal drones, a call and response between West Yorkshire and North Africa that dissolves in to some poignant lonely piano playing. Only ten minutes per side though.
On the solo disc theres Popol Vuh in hippy mood [was there any other?] morphing in to the gentle bong and clang of Japanese bowls, to wheezing harmonica, to the looped sounds of bridge strings being plucked, to high pitched Tuvan throat singing as put through a processor so that it sounds like synth whistles and lots and lots of gentle tintinnabulation, this being the modern accompaniment of the plague master coming down the street shouting ‘bring out yer dead’. The pace picks up around the halfway mark but only briefly, never reaching those heady head bob all out wave your arms in the air like you just don’t care shortwave meteor showers that Campbell is capable of. Instead its the steady tone float downstream to the accompaniment of bowl and cymbal ring. A heady, head filling drone emerges to see you off. All rather beautiful and perfectly executed.
Recorded in January/February before the shit started flying. In this country at least. Lockdown tunes for a lockdown thats not really a lockdown.
Research Laboratories
Creep of Paris - Hummingbird X
Cassette.
10 copies.
Creep of Paris - Geronticus Eremita
CDR.
20 copies.
Poultry Breeders Union - Companion Object
Cassette.
9 copies.
Jonnie Prey - Black Candle
Cassette.
45 copies.
Thomas LaRoche - Repeat Prescription MKII
Cassette.
30 copies.
Andrew Jarvis / Thomas LaRoche - Solo Babes
CDR. Split release w/ First Person.
17 copies.
You open your heart to the inevitable digital tide and then I get a response that goes ‘I don’t do digital’ and somewhere deep within me I’m cheering. I’m recycling anyway. If I have your address the chances are you could be the lucky recipient of a box of review material. Watch out for Postie. That’ll be the extremely stressed out person in blue and red marching up and down your street going ‘No I haven’t see you stupid shitting biscuits your daughter sent you’.
And besides, with no digital comes no little envelope with three twenty pence coins in it, a black candle and paper doily. Three of the items that arrive as part of this four cassette, two CD package from Research Laboratories. A label for whom the words ‘online digital presence’ are as alien as ‘a table for two, certainly sir’.
Its all becoming clearer now. You couldn’t put the Jonnie Prey release online because the candle and the paper doily are all part of a ritual that has to be performed while listening to the release itself. I mean, I suppose it is possible that you could procure your own black candle and paper doily but wheres the fun in that?
The twenty pence coins come in a little brown envelope with the Poultry Breeders Union release, it has upon it the typed words ‘Companion Object’. According to the sheet that comes with it these are to be used to ‘call when you have reached your companion object’, by this I’m assuming they mean ‘to call from a public phone box’. I still see public phone boxes but have assumed that the only reason they’re still there is because BT haven’t got around to disconnecting them and putting them on the back of a wagon. Here could follow a long dialogue on how phone boxes always stank of piss and never worked but I’ll save that for another day. On the cassette is nothing but a continuous looped edit of the final speech given by a doomsday cult leader to his followers - ‘you’re only chance to survive or evacuate/planet earth about to be recycled’ and thats it. What I like about this is the slight hesitation in the speakers voice after the word ‘survive’ suggesting this is being spoken from memory and not a prepared speech. Which cult? Which church? I’m having a stab at David Berg and The Children of God.
The instructions on Black Candle read;
Write down your intentions/desires on doily. When you hear the incantation ‘black candle beckons us’’ light the candle and burn doily. Invite the light! Now feel the light!’
Anybody expecting a blow by blow account of how this went is going to be disappointed. Instead I shall pass comment on what I heard and pass Black Candle on to someone more in need of having their intentions/desires met more than mine. A ritual of the lo-fi variety with many voices and much murk, lo-fi porch songs sung on broken guitars, a church assembly singing in reverse as a female voice talks about a haunted church and when the magic words do appear, the sounds of a steady hand-clap and a hell-fire preacher’s sermon. The second side is Mr Preye’s voice reverbing in to oblivion as a synthy throb throbs along. The promo video on Youtube, a pastiche of American 70’s TV par excellence, does this far more justice than I ever could. Thank you Jonnie Preye for lightening my day. Even if I didn’t light the candle.
Both these releases come in the kind of packaging you used to see hanging off wire racks in supermarkets. A piece of card with a hole in it stapled to a plastic bag, the contents therein visible through the company logo and available for purchase.
After which its down to the cassettes themselves to get the message across. In Thomas LaRoche’s case this means a xeroxed typewritten insert and a plain cassette that has about five minutes of music on one side and nothing on the other. Which I played first thinking I hope this isn’t one of those conceptual releases with nothing on it. So I sat and enjoyed the sound of the cassette player motor running and the sound of the cassette clunking along as I thought of what I was going to say in the defence of tape hiss. This can very therapeutic you know. On the flip lies ‘Kodeine Pop’ and LaRoche doing his bit for the Industrial fans amongst us with a slowed down vocals, industrial beats stomp thing. Or in this instance ‘beat’. A steady pounding beat in Mika Vainio fashion but far muddier and deeper in the mix.
This ultra slurred approach of LaRoche’s finds itself on to the two tracks he contributes to the Solo Babes split with Andy Jarvis. The vocal so slow as to put it at the edge of indecipherability, a bit like listening to a drunk trying to tell you their life story while their motor functions slowly shut down. The much shorter track that follows is far more edifying; a section of pretty piano music culled from a dusty, wobbly cassette and looped for three minutes. Whatever happened to classical music cassettes? All grubby and worn, the string section long since gone to decay, the box itself looking like its been to Australia and back on the top of somebodies car. I do miss them.
In fact lets put Jarvo, Creep of Paris and LaRoche in the same room for a minute. Its the room with the cassette players and Dictaphones in it, there’s an old telly in the corner that smells of burning dust, a trim-phone that rings constantly, a wire magazine rack with last weeks NME in it and nicotine stained net curtains in the window thats full of holes.
Andy Jarvis is the one keenest on capturing the Stoke sound. The Stoke Sound being a background of shitty afternoon TV gameshows and the looped scream of a kid having his ball taken from him by a grumpy neighbour. This world is one made from found cassette diaries where people make funny noises with their mouths just to hear what they sound like when played back, someone talking to their cat, someone reciting poetry, the quotidian made in to something greater than its sum by the use of crumbling cassette tape. Twenty minutes of street level heaven.
The two Creep of Paris releases were recorded in the outside toilet during the same time period, the end results being a fine accompaniment to what Mr Jarvis has created. Geronticus Eremita’s opening blend of looped and rotten Basinksi-like Mormon Tabernacle choir the sauce with which you baste the peculiarity of 60’s British TV, tweeting canaries and the deranged moanings of the feeble minded, all of which build to a suitably noise-some crescendo. If you want to hear what ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ sounds like slowed to sludge this is where you need to be. This being the second track which is as good an example of deliciously fucked, slowed and totally mangled cassette tape abuse its been my pleasure to listen to. The Hummingbird X tape is where we find Hasil Adkins doing Filthy Turd covers as he waits for the chippy to warm up the beef dripping, dialogue culled from ansaphones, I’ll be home soon love, yes of course, Terry Jones ringing home to see if Mick Jagger as dropped his mum off. This is where it gets interesting.
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